Scrapbooking and photographing sweet treats and good eats in and around Toronto, bite by bite

Tag Archives: internship

I’m so glad you all liked the photos and post of my first day at Le Dolci’s Cupcakes & Cakes design studio the other day! The support and excitement means a lot to me and it makes me really happy knowing you guys want to know and see more of what I do when I’m here. I can say with absolute conviction that I have the baking itch more than ever now. I know there are times when we all feel like our passion for certain things starts to wane and we start doubting if we actually love what we believe we love. But I’ve been doing scrapbooking since the age of 13 and have only wanted more for myself over time and I have a gut feeling this passion for baking is only going to be fuelled more and more in the best way possible.

On the agenda for Day 2 at Le Dolci: chocolate cupcakes and fondant fun! You’d think after baking cupcakes at home and baking vanilla cupcakes at the studio I’d be set with the chocolates ones. Not exactly. You can bake a million times and still not get it right sometimes. The chocolate batter looked, smelled, and tasted awesome (oh please, like you don’t stick your finger in the mixing bowl to have a taste, right?), but I eyeballed the amount of batter in some of the baking cups wrong and ended up putting a little much batter in some of them with resulted in some chocolate cupcakes that were a little uneven and too big and puffy. Whoops. Sigh. No matter, live and learn, right? I’m showing the ice cream scoop who’s boss next time and you can bet my next batch is going to be freakin’ perfect. One very important thing to learn and always keep in mind: if at first you don’t succeed, kick the problem in the ass and do better next time 😀 Regardless, it was mouthwatering seeing the cooling racks with rows and rows full of chocolate and vanilla cupcakes.

Next up, fun with fondant! This was my very first time playing around with fondant and I felt so giddy as I started rolling, squishing, and moulding balls of it in my hands. I thought to myself, “hmm, I kind of feel like Duff from Ace of Cakes. That, and a pizza maker”. You should have seen me go. I was smacking it down, stretching it out, kneading it, twisting it, poking it with toothpicks to add colour to it, and because I’m silly, sniffing it. Mmm, sugary. Anyway, the fondant fun called for 18 olives with little pimentos in the centers for a corporate cupcake order, so there I was with a dish of different food colourings, a container of toothpicks, and some white fondant to start things off.

Being at Le Dolci is like being in art class and oh how I’ve missed art class. The last time I was in an art class was in 10th grade and sadly, for reasons I’d rather not hash out right now, life went in a different direction and my art classes stopped after that. But art class was the best. You came in every day with your trusty art kit for a solid hour and and a half to work on whatever project you were working on at the time whether it was moulding clay, watercolour, printmaking, or drawing and the best atmosphere was the best. You sat on your art stool with your classmates and friends with the radio on in the background and the time just flew by. And that’s exactly how I felt as I sat in the studio squishing and stretching sweet fondant, and sticking toothpicks into containers of food colouring, quietly trying to achieve the desired olive colour of the company’s olive logo.

And as luck would have it, it took me only one attempt to get the right colour for the first olive! SWEET. A dab of leaf green and two dabs of brown did the trick for the first test olive, so all I needed to do was duplicate the colour for a larger ball of fondant big enough to make 18 olives. I think they turned out okay! They’re not perfect, but I’d say it’s decent for my first time working with fondant. I thought it’d be cute to stick a few toothpicks in them for the photos to make them look like martini olives, hee. With or without – invisible – drinks, every day is a cupcake party at Le Dolci and I can’t wait to keep doing more things with the frosting making, cupcake baking, and fondant squishing 😀

*****

Le Dolci is a private studio located at 75 Portland St., just east of Bathurst near King St. West. The studio hosts cupcake decorating classes and handles catering for both corporate and personal events. For more information on classes, schedules, rates, and more, visit their official website here and their Facebook page here.